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High school students across the country, rejoice: the dreaded third section of the SAT, the essay portion, will soon cease to be a required segment of the nearly four-hour-long exam. This change, along with several other changes test-prep and testing service provider College Board announced Wednesday afternoon, is part of an effort to make the SAT more accessible to more students -- especially those who come from low income families.

Speaking at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, College Board president David Coleman outlined a number of new initiatives that he hopes will expand college access to those who might currently find the college admissions process as costly as it is time-consuming. Chief among his efforts to ensure that lower-income students aren't left out of the process: College Board will now provide every income-eligible student who takes the SAT with four fee waivers to apply to college. While recent data shows the average application fee is $38.39, some schools -- especially top tier schools, like Harvard -- have application fees as high as $75, a price tag that can seem prohibitive to a student coming from a lower-income family. (Harvard, it should be noted, offers its own fee waivers, but College Board's new policy will help account for schools that don't offer such forms of fee-relief.)

In an effort to further bridge the gap between students of lesser means and students whose families can afford to spend thousands of dollars on pricey test prep services -- something College Board called "one of the greatest inequities around college entrance exams" -- College Board also announced that it will soon provide free test prep services for the redesigned SAT. College Board is partnering with Khan Academy to create a free interactive software that will help students identify which areas of the SAT they most need to work on. Since the new, essay-optional SAT will not be first administered until spring 2016 -- sorry, current high school juniors -- this free diagnostic software will not be available until the spring of 2015, College Board said.

However, to help lower income students who need to apply to college this year or in 2015, College Board said that students who will take the current version of the SAT can go to Khan Academy to work through hundreds of previously unreleased practice problems from actual SAT exams, accompanied by more than 200 videos that show how to solve the problems step-by-step.

"What this country needs is not more tests, but more opportunities," Coleman said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. "The real news today is not just the redesigned SAT, but the College Board's renewed commitment to delivering opportunity. We can cut through so much red tape and hesitation by giving students the admission fee waivers they need, information they understand and the encouragement they need to apply more broadly."

The redesigned SAT isn't just returning to the 1600-point scale and turning the now optional essay into a separate score; College Board said it is introducing eight "major changes" to the exam as well. Among those changes:

Gone is the need to study "SAT-vocabulary" (think crepuscular, lachrymose, blunderbuss) that students have never heard before and will likely never use again; in their place are words that students will actually see in college, like empirical or synthesis.

The test's math section will focus on a narrower selection of math concepts, ones that College Board says evidence shows most contributes to student readiness for college and career training: problem solving and data analysis, algebra, and something College Board is calling "passport to advanced math," a topic that will introduce more complex equations than those which exist in algebra.

College Board is adding a "Founding Documents and Great Global Conversation" reading passage, which will be a reading selection drawn from classic American texts that students are likely to have actually seen in school -- like the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, or a letter from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -- and not an esoteric essay about pink flamingos or the best way to go fly fishing.

The rest of the changes can be read here, but aside from the elimination of obscure vocabulary, the change that will likely make students smile the most is this one: College Board is removing the penalty for incorrect answers -- currently, a quarter-point deduction-- and is promising a "more transparent" model of scoring that will only give points for questions answered correctly. College Board says this encourages students to give their best guess to every question, but as an added benefit, the move eliminates some of the gambling involved in taking the test -- and some of the strategy that has led people to declare that taking the SAT is less about what you know but whether or not you've learned how to take the test.

Above all, Coleman said, College Board seeks to make the test reflective of what students are actually learning in school -- and therefore, further diminishes the need to pay for fancy test prep services that bombard students with test-specific information. "Research will guide our efforts to enhance the work students already do in their classes in grades 6–12," he said. "And that research shows that mastery of fewer, more important things matters more than superficial coverage of many."